Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery

Category Archives: Don’t be THAT guy

Here’s a story from Waukegan, IL, a Chicago ‘burb, where a lady fired a single shot, trying to make a neighbor’s dog that had jumped her fence let go of her dog. The neighbor was there, but wasn’t helping.

Since then, though, she got something else: a spray of bullets fired into her house at night.

Romena Rhyan, who lives in the 500 block of McAlister Street, said she has had a hard time sleeping since bullets sprayed through her kitchen window, leaving seven holes in doors and cabinets.

According to Rhyan, the shots were fired from an alley about 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 27. That was two days after she shot a dog that was mauling her dog — both were pit bulls — in her front yard. The other dog later died, Rhyan said.

Waukegan Police confirmed details of the shots fired into Rhyan’s home but would not comment further. Officials would only say it is an open case.

Rhyan said she has been afraid of hosting her granddaughter since the shooting, and her dog has seemed reluctant to venture outside or eat.

Rhyan pulled her dog into the house, but the strange dog, which had leaped over her fence, was clamped on to hers.

By the time she was able to get them back outside, the other dog’s owner was on her porch. According to Rhyan, the other dog owner was “tapping his dog on the head” but wasn’t doing anything to stop the fight.

Rhyan said she ran back inside and grabbed her handgun, for which she has a Firearm Owner’s Identification Card (FOID).

Illinois is one of a few states that requires owners of all guns, even long guns, to be registered. A Firearms Owner’s ID Card lets a person buy and own, but never carry outside the home except for hunting and on sporting ranges, a firearm. It is part of a system established in the Twentieth Century, principally intended to disarm blacks who had moved to Chicago in pursuit of factory work during and after the Second World War.

“He looked up at me and I shot the dog one time,” Rhyan said. “He said, ‘Why did you do that?’ But his dog was killing my dog. It was very traumatic.”

Rhyan called 911, she said. Police officers took her gun following the shooting, but Rhyan said she expects it to be returned because she has a FOID card.

The other dog was taken to a veterinarian for surgery, but later died. Rhyan’s dog suffered wounds on its face, nose, eye, mouth and a paw.

We think Ms Rhyan feels just about like we would in that situation:

“I’m truly sorry about what happened to that dog, I know it wasn’t the dog’s fault,” she said.

Sure, we probably could have wrestled the dogs apart, but we’re not a little old lady. And even for us, Plan B would be to shoot the intruder dog attacking our little dog. Sorry ’bout that. There’s no such thing as a bad dog, at least not to start with, but some dogs fall into the hands of bad owners.

Something tells us the cops have a pretty good idea who shot up Ms Rhyan’s house. Something tells us we do, too.

Joe Huffman attended the anti-gunners’ Smart Gun Symposium in Seattle and saw some surprising things, if we read him right. The presenters were a mixed bag of gun-ban seeking activists and technology nerds. And what they were seeking diverged. Most of the nerds focused solely on the unauthorized-child use prevention case, and admitted that their technology was not even potentially useful for the prevention of crime, or protection of a police officer from a criminal who got hold of his or her gun. Only one, by Joe’s recollection, wanted to see this technology mandated (while all the activists do). No critics of the technology were presented. No spokesman for the gun industry or gun rights was put on. This sham symposium (shamposium?) was sponsored by Washington Cease Fire, a group that has historically sought the banning of all guns, and that demonizes gun owners routinely.

In other words, it was a bunch of Nazis getting together at the Wannsee, full of the love of their brother man and anxious to finally solve the thorny problem of the Jews.

Here are Joe’s reports.

Part 1: Some encounterswith Ralph Fascitelli, il Duce of Washington Cease FIre; New Jersey ban writer Loretta Weinberg (who airily promised that the technology promoted by the firms here could have prevented the Sandy Hook and Charlie Hebdo shootings); and Alan Boinus, the CEO of Allied Biometrix, who promised test data validating his system, licensed from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Part 2: More Fascitelli. (Why couldn’t he make Skype run on time?) Also King County Sheriff Urquhart, and Allied Biometrix CEO Alan Boinus. Fascitelli wants to ban guns, magazines and ammunition and sees “smart guns” as a sort of gateway drug to the ban he really wants — “like e-cigarettes.” Urquhart was a politician with an essentially empty statement. Boinus opposed legislation mandating smart gun because, frankly, they don’t work: “We can’t afford to 404.” Instead he thought supporters should make cops use them. He said his technology adds, along with unreliability, $200 to $300 to the price of a gun, most of which was his marketing and profit (essentially doubling the price of a cop Glock).

Highly unsafe, Trigger Smart technology is trivially jammed.

Part 3. Robert MacNamara, Trigger Smart. Also Loretta Weinberg, Democrat, leader of the New Jersey Senate, and Judith Leftwitch, Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (a ban group). MacNamara is an Irishman, no apparent relation to the worst Secretary of Defense, and appears to be completely ignorant of both firearms and technology (his background is in real estate, but he’ll take grant money from Uncle Sam). When asked about the jam threat to his system he indicated that it works on radio frequency energy, which can’t be jammed, a complete error suggesting a lack of even interest in his own product. “Trigger Smart” is more like “Trigger Retarded” and also would double the price of a cop Glock, if cops really want guns that are trivially jammed. Weinberg and Leftwitch just want to ban guns.

Part 4: Margot Hirsch, Smart Tech Challenges Foundation. Mark Burles, Penn Schoen Berland (Democratic/liberal public relations firm employed by Washington Cease Fire). Hirsch is a former saleswoman who now heads this shadowy foundation, whose shadowy sources of funding are undisclosed — the foundation has never published its Form 990s, even — but seem to be anti-gun activists who won big at Silicon Valley startup lotto. Hirsch is high on smart guns — and gun bans. Her immediate former employer, Blackboard Inc, made an extremely unreliable web-based software suite used by for-profit online schools to, essentially, rook people out of .gov money via student loans. Burles presented what appears to have been an online push poll crafted to push Cease Fire’s positions

Symposium in the news, in which Joe posts links to three stories, one a single-sided hack job (typing for il Duce Fascitelli) and one of the other two essentially putting a sheen of editorial polish on the press release.

Armatix isn’t officially dead yet, just pining for the fjords.

The Future of Dynamic Grip Recognition, in which Joe unearths from all the activism the only one of the mere two presented technologies that might work. Apparently Ernst “because you suck and we hate you” Mauch’s Armatix, which used unreliable RFID from a watch, is out of money, leaving just “Trigger Smart” and Allied Biometrix at the symposium, and with Trigger Smart being laugh-out-loud levels of lame, only Allied’s preliminary efforts to commercialize fifteen years of dead ends at the NJIT have any hope at all. Joe tries to find what hope there is in it, but it’s very scant indeed. Basically, there’s a lot of 404 in this technology.

This is the image NJIT/Allied Biometrix like to show of their 50% reliable technology… showing 8 of the several dozen single points of failure added to the gun itself, alone.

But you do need the battery box. (It’s been reduced in size, but not in criticality, since this version). Note the connector on the newer photo. The Biometrix are on you.

In addition, here is Dave Workman’s report on the symposium’s press conference (via Joe) which partly failed because all these free-range fascists who want to design the innards of your guns couldn’t get a Skype connection working. “There are some people who want to define safety as something that never goes bang,” SAAMI’s Rick Patterson, the guy who the nerds couldn’t hook up, told Workman (who apparently had no problem reaching him). Of course, the sponsors of this shaminar are exactly those people.

None of the technology appears safe or reliable now, nor in the foreseeable future. Joe, who is more willing than we are to give these various New Jersey and California creeps the benefit of the doubt, sees a small potential market. Perhaps, for someone who wants to keep a varmint or defense gun loaded while interdicting curious children; we see that market coming only in ten or fifteen years, assuming the .gov funds unlimited research. (So far the government appears to have funded all the research, and the furtive foundation primarily funds activism, Bloomberg-style). This slice of the market might add up to a quarter to a half percent of gun sales, under those circumstances.

In every firearm, this technology will decrease reliability by some nonzero amount. Anything else is only possible if it literally does nothing. Therefore it has zero future in police use (where Boinus would like it mandated) or home or personal defense (something MacNamara apparently thought people shouldn’t have guns for anyway, to the delight of the ban-happy audience).

Ever notice how the people who burn with the fire to run your life for you, generally couldn’t organize a towel rack?

Lots of ICE special agents are finding time on their hands, given that the current Administration does not want to deport criminal aliens — or even to arrest or charge them. So what are they doing? Making sure nobody disses their favorite sports teams!

ICE’s resources are also being devoted to suppress critical uses: “The profane debasing of a mascot — and really anything that denigrates a team — is guaranteed to be contraband, said Daniel Modricker, a spokesman for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That ‘Yankees Suck’ T-shirt you put on for special occasions? If it uses anything that looks like a team or league logo, it probably constitutes trademark infringement.”

Well, that’s about what you’d expect from Modricker, a toady’s toady who believes in the power of positive sucking-up to his political owners and operators. But Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet has a different take on it.

No, it really, really doesn’t. “Profane debasing”–and when did mascots become sacred?–is not confusing. I don’t think ICE has authority to seize diluting merchandise, and anyway very few of these will be using the profaned mascots “as a mark,” meaning the dilution exceptions for parody and criticism apply. This is a blatant misunderstanding of the law, being perpetuated by a federal official with only the small reassurance that federal agents won’t come down and rip a previously purchased shirt off your back.

Less annoying, but also sort of funny, is the attempt to answer the question “why are you spending so much time on fake jerseys” by pointing to problems caused by fake cribs and auto parts. The Superbowl is a good opportunity to highlight the issue!

In pushing what’s called inside ICE “IPR,” or Intellectual Property Rights, Modricker and his supervisors are currying favor with ICE head John Morton. Morton has a record of accomplishment that’s gauzily thin, but one thing he did do was get the ICE/HSI shield on blu-ray discs along with the FBI’s. He’s spent the last two years, and vast amounts of taxpayer money on charter flights, stroking Hollywood and Big Content in general in hopes of a very rich post-government job, preferably at MPAA in LA. MPAA, run by second-generation crooked Senator, Corrupt Chris Dodd, didn’t think Morton was worth the stratospheric salary and perks he was demanding, but apparently he got his ask from a too-big-to-fail bank instead. At least according to ICE gadfly Debbie Schlussel, who reports Morton’s new job and resignation.

Debbie’s pretty hard on him, but if you were a president who had an agency he didn’t want to be enforcing any laws, you’d beat the bushes for a guy like Morton. A platypus is an ungainly animal, but it fits its evolutionary niche, and so does Morton.

On the other hand, if you have money in Capital One, the bank that hired Morton, now is a really good time to take it out and put it someplace safer — like your mattress, or having Gerry the Gambler hold it for you.

Even with Morton gone, IPR will probably still get more attention from ICE than the “ICE” stuff they’re supposed to be doing does. The NFL, for instance, is owned by fabulously rich people, who want and expect to be fabulously richer. ICE leadership, not just under Morton, responds to people like that. Ordinary citizens? The hundreds of thousands whose lives have been forever changed by criminal alien murderers and rapists? The victims of the half of FBI most-wanted violent criminals who are illegals? Those people aren’t in the 1%, and Morton and his ICE men have no time for that.

But anything that might interfere with using taxpayer resources to make Robert Kraft richer? Modricker and his fellow toadies are going to step on that with hockey skates on. For the benefit of the departing Morton, and whatever stuffed suit replaces him. It’ll still be the agency where the actual job is off limits, where special agents and supervisors have shoot-outs in the Federal Building over assignments, and where the surest way to get on your boss’s shit list is to arrest an actual violent criminal alien.

On the other hand, it’s not like they shipped Mexican cartels thousands of weapons, lost a suit because they mistreated one of their own agents (and PO’d the judge by having their in-house lawyers lie to him), and had one of their SES managers arrested prostituting himself in a New Orleans hotel. That’s the other ate-up agency.

It looks in this mugshot as if she is the one that was drowned. Unfortunately, no.

There are things that shock. And then there are things that shock the conscience. This is one of those things, and the victim was, fortunately, not human. The victim in this case was a 3-week-old Doberman puppy.

Cynthia Anderson, a 56-year-old Florida resident, was arrested Friday afternoon at the Central Nebraska Regional Airport in Grand Island. Anderson, seen at right, was charged with animal cruelty.

What’d she do?

According to cops, Anderson first tried to board a plane Thursday with three uncaged puppies, but was turned away by airport personnel. After her parents took two of the dogs, Anderson returned to the airport Friday with the remaining puppy (which she sought to conceal in a carry-on bag).

After she was again denied boarding…

We’ll give the next line to the responding officer:

On my arrival I learned a 3 week old puppy had been drowned in the toilet after a woman tried 3 times to get it on the plane.

Words fail.

Anderson was arrested after police interviewed her and “numerous witnesses,” including a woman who discovered the dead dog.

To us, this is disturbing on several levels. (A 3-week-old canine isn’t even weaned, for one). But the most amazing thing about it, to us, is that we’ve flown from time to time with a small dog or average-sized cat on an airplane. All you need to do on most airlines is tell them in advance, and pay a small fee, which usually runs from $50 to $100 per leg of the flight.

We’ve also found traveling with a pet to be a great icebreaker with other passengers. “Oh, he’s so cute! Let him out.” (But of course, we can’t do that, not wanting to be on TV as the cat or dog owner who made JetBlue 222 divert to Podunk National).

Good God. Drowning a puppy. There are times you don’t get on the flight, and one of them is when they don’t let your animals (or kids) board.

Update

After she bonded out of a Florida jail, where she was being held on the Nebraska warrant from the Case of the Floating Fido, Anderson was arrested again on Florida theft charges, and she’s back in prison stripes, with a new (and equally photogenic) mugshot.

Some people are just born to rot in prison, which is the principal reason we have to expend societal resources to build and staff prisons.

What are the odds — mental illness? Or substance abuse? Occam’s Razor suggests the involvement of Old Demon Alcohol in Anderson’s life of wrong choices and inescapable consequences.

Again, these show nothing like scientific testing, and they seem to be hard to make anything out, whether that’s deliberate or accidental, we can’t say.

Sound suppression:

Flash suppression, night firing:

Conclusion: these promo videos are not significant. Compare the “night test” video to Andrew Tuohy’s flash suppressor tests at Vuurwapen Blog (which seem to have lost their photos, but the links to the narratives still live).

There is a site that purports to test silencers independently, Silencer Research, but it does not seem to have been active in several years, and Silencer Tests, which was tied to one vendor (AAC?), is paws up.

James, for his part, has both yellowbellied out of a comparison test with Liberty (suggesting that even he knows the Aero-Sonic deflated football is a failure and a fraud designed to scam money off novices with false claims), and doubled down on social media claims of the vaporware gadget’s performanc, with (of course) extra self-promotion and empty boasting:

I’ve never been much of a follower, and I rarely ask for permission. Never half-ass anything… We gave #ShotShow2015 attendees a peek inside the #JJFU Aero-Sonic sound suppressor. I think most were very surprised at the thought and science behind it. I totally lied about the decibel rating…Its actually way lower..

At Silencer Talk, this vaporware suppressor has been the subject of discussion (and derision) since 2013. Some of the unkind comments in this long-running thread include:

. I find it absolutely laughable that a man who popularized the phrase ‘Cake Decorator’ when describing other bike builders that merely hung superfluous crap off a bike checks in with the absolute dogsh*t he has put out.

The Aero-Sonic suppressor looks like a vibrator for a horse.

“Honest, the Aero-Sonic is undergoing testing.”

I actually had customers asking me why my 30cal suppressor is rated at 135db on a 12″ Ar 5.56 if his were 78db.

His suppressor likely fell off the desk and is stuck between his time travel machine and the other machine that turns straw into gold.

Now look at what sort of bikes JJ and WCC usually makes. You can buy 20 year old production bikes that will outperform those pig-iron hogs in every aspect except the ability to make you look like a poser with more money than sense.

He’s marketing to the dolt who has no taste or idea what he’s buying community, not the well-heeled ‘collector’ community.

He … turned a perfectly good BAR into a cross between mall ninja porn and a lowrider from the barrio.

He’s a flatbill dumbass that wandered *way* out of his area of expertise.

the March Hare is going to show me his 105 Db. metered suppressor for my .50 Barrett.

Jesse is putting car muffler and manifold technologies into a firearm silencer. It doesn’t work.

His shop should be called “Pimp my Gat”.

As pointed out in the comments to our post on the Aero-Sonic Deflated Football, “You Can Tell He’s Lyin’, ‘Cause His Lips Are Movin’,” when asked to put up or shut up, Jesse James made sissy-boy excuses and then sniveled away into the arms of the clueless posers that are his fans.

The guy’s a thoroughgoing phony, and his designs are styled-not-engineered rubbish, and buying one is like putting on a sandwich board saying, “I’m a Bigger Dumbass Than Jesse James,” and that’s putting yourself out way on the tail of the dumbass distribution bell curve.

Geez, look at how the cops talk about this guy. “Suspected Aryan Brotherhood member.” And they say they think he’s a “member of the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood.” They’re “working to confirm it.”

Gee whiz. Well, take a look at this angel, who showed up in the local fishwrap after threatening to burn his mom’s house down. (Yes, really):

We don’t know about you, but looking at his face, we had to go check our tackle box for missing lures and spinners. (Nope, we’ve got all our fishing tackle, that’s somebody else’s adorning Herr Unter-runter-führer’s fugly mug). We don’t know where anyone would get the idea he’s in the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang fond of Nazi symbology and posturing. You?

OK, well, apart from the three AB tats showing in the mugshot. They do seem to hint that he’s either onboard with them, or very disrespectful of their copyrights.

Story follows.

Suspected Aryan Brotherhood member Stephen Sanders pleaded not guilty to resisting arrest and criminal mischief at his probable cause hearing Jan. 15.
Sanders, of 16 Lita Lane in Newmarket, offered no plea on two counts of criminal threatening. According to court records those counts were dismissed by Judge David LeFrancois.
According to an affidavit signed by Officer Wayne Stevens, on Jan. 8, Sanders’ mother came to the police station telling officers that she had ordered Sanders to move out of her house. He reportedly came angry, telling his mother that “he would have his Aryan brothers burn her house down.”
Sanders also alleged that her son had threatened to stab another family member with a large kitchen knife.
Sgt. Jeremy Hankin responded to the Lita Lane address with the intention of arresting Sanders based on his mother’s information. Hankin and two other officers found Sanders sitting in his vehicle, police said. When asked to step out of the vehicle, Sanders initially refused, but then complied, police said.
Sanders argued with the officers after they informed him that he was under arrest for criminal threatening. Eventually Sanders was subdued on the ground and tasered, according to police.
Sanders is currently in Rockingham County Jail awaiting a trial management conference on Feb. 3.
When reached for comment on Tuesday, Lt. Jeff Simes said police believe Sanders is a member of the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood and are working to confirm it.

We’d just sum up by saying, there is nothing more pathetic than an American seeking to portray himself as a Nazi, the most thoroughly discredited identity since the Romans salted the fields of Carthage and destroyed the human-sacrifice temples of Baal (temples that perfectly prefigured the National Socialist regime’s Final Solution). By the summer of ’45 every Nazi from Ferdinand Porsche to Rudolf Hess was denying he had ever really been on board with the program — so where do these chuckleheads who want to join up with in now come from?

American Nazis. Lord love a duck. Although, we’d grant than an American seeking to play Communist is just about the same pathetic thing.

Now, we never watched this jamoke’s TV show, although the promos we saw made motorcycle builder Jesse James look like a self-promoting blowhard. Now his new business is firearms, and he really looks like a blowhard. To wit, here is his new silencer:

Here’s the innards of this deflated-football-shaped suppressor.

Notice that they’re made of aluminum and stainless, but mostly aluminum. We’ll get back to that. Meanwhile, here are one set of claims he has made for the suppressor:

Test fired with 5.56 ammo, sound was 78 decibels at the muzzle.
Zero Optic Heat Signature
[tl; shortened to] doesn’t get too hot to touch in one 30 round mag
Zero Muzzle Flash
Zero muzzle flash …from 25 yards in front of the shooter. Filmed from 10 feet to the side of the shooter a very dim flash was visible for the first 2 semi auto rounds fired.
Fired on full auto, NO muzzle flash was visible from the front or sides.
Zero Loss in Round Velocity
Rounds picked up 100 meters per second of velocity.
Aero Sonic equipped guns [are] MORE accurate, showing no typical suppressed round drop.
Most common suppressors have a 2500 round lifespan. We have several active prototypes with 20,000+ rounds and counting.

He did have someone who could spell clean up “gentile manor,” after several days of internet japery, but some of the SHOT show facebook nonsense persists, and other numbers have been transmogrified.

Jesse James’s Velocity Increase Claim is Suspect

The velocity-increase claim (a physical, shall we generously say, unlikelihood) has been circumcised from 200 to “merely” 100 mps increase.

Meters per second is a kind of unusual choice for an American company dealing in the ballistic realm, where the whole indutry, for better or for worse, runs on feet per second in ballistic terms and always has. To translate these outlandish claims into the units you usually work with, one foot per second is 0.3048 m/s. That means he is claiming that his magic football accelerates a projectile approximately 656, or 328, feet per second. What’s the science behind this claim?

The inner barrel acts much like a barrel extension.

So, he’s claiming his 8 inch barrel (hmmm, that wasn’t in SI units?) adds 300, or 600, plus, fps. Well, in 2012, we noted in a post on some Swedish magic claims a variety of tests of barrel length vs. velocity show a loss of 12 to 25 or so fps in a shortened barrel — however, that’s for a barrel, not an ersatz barrel with a lot of big slots milled in it. One outlier produced 44 fps/inch-shortened on a .300 Win Mag.

In 2013, we cited Ballistics by the Inch as a Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week. BBTI has done a lot of tests on many calibers; their 5.56 results are here, showing a more extensive drop than any other study; this may have been James’s source for numbers as it shows an accelerated drop off when barrels are shortened beyond usual carbine lengths.

James is claiming his ersatz barrel boosts MV 41 to 82 fps per inch, numbers that disagree with five barrel-shortening chronograph studies cited in our 2012 blog post. His derivation of these numbers, compared to the existing body of data, suggests irreproducible results.

We notice that his claims of sound reduction or sound pressure levels come without any information on standards. There is a MIL-STD for measuring suppressor sound, MIL-STD 1474D (.pdf @ silencertalk.com) . We pretty much guarantee he isn’t using this standard. Which standard is he using?

78 dB? The number is almost certainly a produce of the SAE method — Scientific Anal Extraction. As this test video of a Liberty multi-caliber suppressor shows, closing the bolt or slide on most firearms produces from 106 to 118 dB or so (you can see examples in the video below). A 5.56mm rifle with a 16″ barrel produces 164 dB or so, bare. With the Liberty Mystic multi-cal suppressor (at about 5:05 in the video) it produces 149 dB +3 on the first round according to the MIL-STD, and 137 dB at the ear. Now, that’s really a handgun suppressor, but good carbine suppressors (including some of the same vendor whose multi-cal suppressor is tested in the video, Liberty) can get you down to 133, 135 dB or so at the ear.

An important note is that a suppressed AR is significantly louder (anywhere from 3 to 10 dB) on the ejection port side than it is on the blank side. This is a concern for left-handed shooters because a suppressor can come with completely legitimate paperwork indicating that it’s hearing-safe for the user, but the fine print may note that it’s tested for a right-handed user. Someone who left-shoulders a “safe, 135 dB” carbine-can combo may be taking 142 dB at his ears.

So, how does Jesse James’s magic get to 78 dB, approximately 40 dB lower than the sound of the bolt sliding home? Bearing in mind that decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale? His explanations are the mumbo-jumbo of someone who does not understand sound, the decibel scale, or, frankly, physics. At all. Things like:

Our unique design lets the air expand in the pulse shape of a super sonic sound wave. All internal surfaces are machined with organic curves in an effort to reduce turbulence. Turbulence = Harmonics = Sound. The more gently you can slow down the air, the quieter the results.

Super Sonic air pressure is also regulated with our patented inner barrel design. Pressure relief slots are machined in an oscillating pattern. This regulates the outward flowing air to the suppressor chambers. This helps the already expelled air to bleed off, and not be hyper charged as it passes thorough the suppressor chambers.

If, after reading that, you’re saying, “Whaaa…?” you just might have a STEM degree. Or a significant quantity of common sense. Or some experience with suppressors.

If, after reading that, you’re saying, “OMG Take my money!” then he has a magic deflated-football to sell you. And we left out the best bit till now: he wants $4,500 for it.

We call bullshit on the whole thing — but this guy’s whole career has been selling people the sizzle, not the steak, so some chuckleheads out there are going to buy this thing. Don’t be that guy.

These ISIL imb-isils are answering the shouted question, “How many brain cells have you got?” Note the cat in the second line with two fingers, and the guy in the back, behind the clown with the Syrian-flag headband, holding up all five fingers? They’re the brains of this outfit.

But Bubba is their armorer. Putting the scope where the rail is, not where the scope needs to be, is a bit like the drunk who was looking for his car keys a couple of blocks from where he lost them, “because there’s a streetlight here!” Let’s zoom in a little closer on this lash-up, because the picture’s kind of dark. We’ll lighten it with an Auto Levels tool and see if that helps the Bubba job stand out (it embiggens, but has lousy resolution).

The scope is on a who-needs-a-jeezly-cheekweld height mount, and seems to be mounted at an angle to the bore better measured in degrees than in Minutes of Angle or Miliradians. But wait, what’s that opposite the scope?

Why, yes, it is two fore-grips, because Allah helps those who keep a grip, evidently. The clown is gripping a Grip-pod, and right behind it there’s a folding grip, which looks to us like the Command Arms product. (Funny. Grip-pod doesn’t list ISIL when they mention “Who Uses Grip-Pod“. We thought “there is no such thing as bad publicity!”)

This Arab assclown is undoubtedly more of a threat to himself and those around him than he is to any enemy other than an unarmed child, but then, that’s the history of Arab arms in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Despite that, these inept brain-deads have been beating, defeating, hell, clobbering, the guys that were well disposed to us in particular and to civilization in general. We live in interesting times.

A small local corporation and two of its principals are now felons, thanks to playing fast and loose with export licensing on two aircraft fuel gauges. A long investigation by HSI, ICE and DCIS investigators led to arrests and guilty pleas this month.

Charges were filed on May 14, 2014 alleging that Netria exported aircraft parts to Malaysia without a license from the U.S. Department of State, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.

The investigation into Netria began as a result of an inquiry by Netria to a Department of Homeland Security undercover storefront, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service working together.

Evidence gathered established that Netria had exported two Lockheed Martin Fuel Quantity Indicators; items designated “defense articles” on the United States Munitions List in violation of the Arms Export Control Act.

The company was sentenced to probation (how does that work? Checking in with your PO has got to be a production!) and fines; the two executives haven’t been formally sentenced yet.

As part of their plea agreement, Netria was sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to forfeit $12,560.

In addition, William F. McKone and Raymond L. Southworth, Jr., who comprise the board of directors of Netria, pleaded guilty to one count of violating the AECA.

The offense is a malum prohibitum one and there’s no real defense to it; the charged executives of the Netria corporation flew a trial-balloon of “ignorance of the law,” but that didn’t fly, as they’d had some training on the law’s terms.

Selling fuel gages, and even C-130 cargo plane parts, to customers in Malaysia might easily have been licensed, if the real end users were Malaysian. (The problem with this off-the-books stuff is a lot of it goes via shell companies to regimes that are supposed to be laboring under international sanctions. This is one of the ills export licensing is supposed to cure).

The HSI special agents who investigate these cases are former ICE agents, redeployed since the Department has abandoned most enforcement of immigration law.

In this video, Deputy Kyle Dinkheller is murdered. It is hard to watch, but there is a reason we have to do it: the dead deputy is without influential friends in this world, but the jitbag who engages him in this video was celebrated for the rest of his life. Which fortunately ended on a vinyl-covered slab on the 13th, as the citizens of the great state of Georgia put Andrew Brannan down like the rabid dog he was. Dinkheller left a pregnant wife and kids (a son was born after his death, and will never know his father). The murder took place on 12 January 1998. The Laurens County Sheriff’s Office was a relatively early adopter of dash cams, and so Brannan’s prosecutors had this to work with, and his defense had this to explain away:

The explanation the flailing defenders chose is that Brannan couldn’t help doing this because he was a Vietnam combat veteran. Stew on that for a minute; we’ll come back to it.

A fact seldom mentioned in the media is on the same video recording, before this particular clip begins. Dinkheller didn’t stop Brannan for “no reason,” or because he was on some kind of cop power trip. He stopped him because he clocked the man driving that junkbox pickup at 98 miles per hour. Yeah, this guy shot a cop for stopping him for speeding.

In the end, he got what was coming to him. Among the witnesses that watched Brannan make a seamless transition from jitbag-in-prison to jitbag-in-perdition were 20 deputies from the Laurens County Sheriff’s Office. Kyle Dinkheller’s friends and co-workers waited 16 years for the ACLU’s efforts to make this crime pay to fail out, and the ancient lex talionis to find its fulfillment.

This is not Captain Kangaroo. Bob Keeshan was an honorably discharged vet who lived a decent life. This is Andrew Brannan. To Hell with him.

Of course, the criminal groupies haven’t stopped pining for Brannan just because Brannan has achieved progressive nirvana, to wit, a carbon footprint of zero. Naomi Schavin, one of the no-experience-less-talent writers hired by the flailing New Republic recently (yes, the publication that has a long history of running with fabrications, and that just published a movie review by a reviewer who had only seen the movie’s trailer, thatNew Republic), has a shallow and disorganized piece in the magazine. Her point? Veterans with PTSD should be, if not exactly excused for murders like this, at least exempted from execution. She’s talking specifically about this Captain Kangaroo-lookin’ butt blossom.

Watch the video again. Schavin deliberately maximizes Brannan’s irrationality (actually, he looks less like a nut job, and more like just a common-and-garden sphincter muscle, to us). And she minimizes his crime, and elides the fact that it was Brannan unilaterally who made every esclatory move in the fight:

Brannan’s reaction escalated rapidly from taunting Dinkheller to screaming at him, culminating in a firefight that left Dinkheller dead.

“REaction?” What? And, “Culminating in a firefight?” Our hairy combat-vet hiney. Watch the video again, don’t accept Schavin’s lies about it. She’s missing a few steps, this lying reporter. Brannan’s actions — not reaction — escalated from taunting, to screaming, to pulling out an M1 Carbine and shooting, to cold-bloodedly executing his wounded, defenseless victim. But he’s the one that has Schavin’s sympathy. Maybe the gun made him do it! Being twaumatized as a vet made him do it!

Well, who really gives a hairy rat’s ass what made him do it? Two million guys (and tens of thousands of gals) served in Vietnam and didn’t whack a deputy thirty or forty years later, so it’s not like society’s holding him to an impossible standard.

And then there’s the whole firefight thing. Brannan attacked Dinkheller without warning and put nine rounds into him (and plenty more into random terrain), where the deputy just nailed Brannan in the brisket once (fortunately, enough to make him easy to catch). That’s an ambush, not a firefight. Firefight implies a degree of contact among rough equals.

It’s not just that Schavin is illogical, irrationally inverse in her thinking (in her mixed-up, tossed-up, never-come-down world, Dinkheller deserves death, and Brannan release and “treatment”). But she’s also thoroughly dishonest (look at how she misrepresents Brannan’s attack on the deputy). She accepts the PTSD bullshit from Brannan’s lawyers, the usual criminal-loving murder fanboys.

So, what would she have done?

…precautionary measures to keep his community safe … like removing his firearm…

Oh, we saw that coming…. Guess what? His community is now safe, sweetheart. And no firearms were harmed during the application of suitable treatment of this toxic bipedal pathogen.

Got any more advice for the grown-ups’ world, child?

…governors might consider staying all executions of veterans with the diagnosis [PTSD]….

Like hell. How many PTSD diagnoses are being ridden for a disability by phonies, pre-existing nutballs, and guys like Brannan, who are just turds who can’t function in civilization?

Being a vet didn’t make him do that. Nothing you can see or do in combat can make a guy do that. It’s what a guy is, what a guy is inside, that makes him do things like that.

Of course, there are guys suffering with post-combat stress, real guys with real troubles. But most of them are dangers to no one, and the ones who are, unfortunately, dangerous, are primarily hazards to themselves. If Naomi Schavin knew combat vets, a species one seldom encounters in the coffee houses of Manhattan, salons of Georgetown or writers’ lofts anywhere, she’d know that. And in absolutely no case is PTSD the excuse for murder that she and other pro-criminal campaigners make it out to be.

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About WeaponsMan

WeaponsMan is a blog about weapons. Primarily ground combat weapons, primarily small arms and man-portable crew-served weapons. The site owner is a former Special Forces weapons man (MOS 18B, before the 18 series, 11B with Skill Qualification Indicator of S), and you can expect any guest columnists to be similarly qualified.

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